Finally, Someone Likens Parenting To Marketing
You know what’s worse than waiting all day for an app (an app!) to get back to you? The fact that an article called “Father’s Day: What’s your ROI?” exists.
Finally, someone likens parenting to marketing. Tech newsmedia brethren, have you given up?
I know, I know, some of our guest posts are also atrocious, and our world does have bigger fish to fry, but weren’t Fridays supposed to be the days that you did journalism, VentureBeat?
Did “Journalism Fridays” not work out? Were you all like “Fuck it, SEO”?
I mean, check this out. All mistakes actually exist in the original post.
To all the fathers out there who think they could be doing better, you are not alone. Recently released data from the federal’s government’s finds that 46 percent of you feel the same way …
And …
Fathers only wait for someone to bring them their slippers and a martini in the movies. In the real world, you have to engage. You have to reach out with the same fearlessness and determination as you would with a new business prospect. Or, to take a page from the Sheryl Sandberg playbook, you must “lean in.”
And …
You didn’t give up when your company didn’t get funding. You didn’t give up when your code crashed your machine. By the same token, don’t give up when your attempts to use technology to model some good old-fashioned positive male behavior fails.
Brave new world with such pieces of content in it.
Read More →PCORI challenge awards $125K to these 8 digital tools that connect patients & researchers
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For the $40,000 prize in the prototype category,PCORI chose WellSpringboard, a crowdsourcing platform developed by a team at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.A demo of the prototype site shows how users can endorse,pledge funds to,and volunteer for research topics.Social network PatientsLikeMe received an honorable mention,which comes with a $5,000 prize.Other honorable mentions include S.T.A.R. Initiative,which would engage African American women in identifying and recruiting researchers to help answer their questions and concerns about breast cancer; and Lucid Bell’s Patient-Researcher Match,which would incorporate data from the NIH’s clinical trials database and let users create topic profiles.
SOURCE LINK:http://medcitynews.com/2013/06/pcori-challenge-awards-125k-to-these-8-digital-tools-that-connect-patients-researchers/#.UbcXQXb7Zms.twitter
Tags: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, digital-health, health-it, hospitals, patients, pcori
Read More →Crowdfunding — The Future of Financing in the Entertainment Industry?
Finding the money for a new creative project or business venture can often be the major obstacle in making your creative idea a reality. But what if you could tap the power of social media…
Read More →Snapchat Hiring Massive Sales Team, Said To Be Raising $100M At A Near $1B Valuation To Pay Them
Snapchat is aggressively recruiting sales people from Stanford as well as USC for its impending debut of a monetization scheme, we’ve discovered. Meanwhile it’s raising $100 million at a valuation as high as $1 billion to pay them, as well as buy more servers and hire other talent to power its rapidly growing self-destructing messaging app, sources say.
Earlier this week Om Malik of GigaOm reported Snapchat was raising $100 million but at a valuation “in excess of a half a billion dollars”, that one source pegged at $700 million post-money. Many of us at TechCrunch had heard rumors of the round, particularly tied to a push in the company’s hiring and monetization. Malik reports that the “founders have settled on an unnamed non-tradition investors (read: hedge-fund)” for this round.
However, we’ve heard that’s not totally accurate. Several sources have told us Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy are shooting for an even more ambitious valuation near $1 billion. That matches speculation of a higher valuation from Fortune’s Dan Primack. We’ve also heard the company may be in talks with its $13.5 million Series A round leader Benchmark Capital about joining the Series B. We’ve also heard that this round has already closed, but can’t confirm that yet.
Some might call the valuation too high, but it’s fueled by Snapchat’s surging popularity and intense engagement, especially amongst young people. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends report said that Snapchat has eclipsed Instagram in volume of photos shared.
While Facebook’s acquired photos app sees people share the occasional photo publicly and browse its feed, Snapchat hosts incredible time-in-app as users privately send photo after photo while carrying on multiple conversations with friends. These photos (and videos) delete themselves less than 10-seconds after being viewed, encouraging users to create and send more “Snaps”. The push notifications these ephemeral messages generate lead to frequent return visits. Curiosity about what funny face, current surroundings, or racy imagery their friends have just sent them creates goads people to check Snapchat as soon as their pinged, keeping conversations moving along briskly.
Selling Self-Destructing Photos
All that engagement creates an enormous opportunity for monetization. Snapchat sees this, which is why the Stanford-schooled co-founders of the Los Angeles-based startup have been recruiting at their alma mater, and to a lesser extent their LA neighbor the University Of Southern California. And we’re not talking about just a few salespeople. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit we’ve heard is that the company has been hiring a veritable army of ad sellers. Snapchat is currently at a lean headcount of 12, but has outgrown its Venice beachfront office and will move to a larger office, still in the Los Angeles area.
Spiegel told us in our very first interview that the company had plans for monetization, and told us in December that the company was prototyping monetization features. And at the D11 conference, Spiegel said “There will eventually be several revenue streams. He didn’t go into more detail but noted that he thinks ads can “work very well on mobile” and Snapchat’s been playing around with early prototypes. Now, with new funding and new hires, revenue can’t be far behind for the young company.
Snapchat has had a strong, loyal user base among high school and college students. I (Billy) remember watching friends at Stanford beta test the app and thinking what a novelty it was that it spread beyond snapping pictures of Palm Drive and Cardinal football tailgates. Now, I look at the “Find Friends” feature of the site and its filled with older family friends, friends’ moms (thankfully not my mom…yet), and more.
The explosion in growth the app has seen–users now send 150 million images per day–cannot simply be high school and college students. Snapchat has tipped and is seeing adoption in other age brackets. Josh confirms a recent spike in older, late twenty-something users getting into the irreverent spirit of the app. Meanwhile, after a short honeymoon for Facebook’s ephemeral messaging app Poke, usage of the Snapchat-clone has dried up to mostly just the Facebook employees in his network.
Spiegel and co-founder Murphy have carefully selected their media outreach, from exclusives in The New York Times to appearing on The Colbert Report, to reach beyond the classroom types. They want their app to become a household name.
While many wrote off Snapchat as just a novelty, it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s actually an important new medium for communication. Posting to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can seem like stale pandering for Likes and favorites, or a vain declaration of accomplishment. “I was there then.” But Snapchat feels like a shared moment in time, an urgent window from one person’s life into another. Snapchat means “Be With Me Now.”
More TechCrunch coverage of Snapchat:
Snapchat Launches v5.0 With Revamped UI, Swipe Navigation, And In-App Profiles
Snapchat Accounts For More Photo Shares Than Instagram As Pic Sharing Set To Double In 2013
Taco Bell Asks Twitter Followers To Add Them On Snapchat, Users May Soon See Snaps From Brands
The Snapchat Lawsuit, Or How To Lose Your Best Friend Over $70 Million
Snapchat Raises $13.5M Series A Led By Benchmark, Now Sees 60M Snaps Sent Per Day
No, Snapchat Isn’t About Sexting, Says Co-Founder Evan Spiegel
Read More →Microsoft Unveils Crowdfunding Program for College Students
Microsoft announced a new crowdfunding initiative yesterday, aimed at college students in need of a PC.
The program, called ‘Chip In,’ will allow students to set up a fundraising page for a laptop or tablet of their choice, to which friends and family will be able to contribute.
Related:- RocketHub and A&E Launch ‘Project Startup’
Microsoft says it is contributing the first ten percent to the campaigns, essentially by offering the PCs at a ten percent discount. While anyone will be able to create a fundraising page, only students with a valid .edu email address (or an international student identity card) will be able to purchase a PC once it’s funded; alumni cannot participate in the promotion.
Those who don’t meet their goal but raise at least $499 will be able to spend the money at the Microsoft online store. The first 10,000 students who crowdfund their new PC will also receive a free four-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 University.
“With Chip In from Microsoft, students can leverage the power of their social networks to help them get a new PC and Office 365 University this back-to-school season,” Kristina Libby, head of consumer communications for Windows, said in a press release announcing the initiative.
With the college semester having just ended, Microsoft is starting the back-to-school season early, and the initiative will run until September 1st. As Mashable pointed out, Microsoft could be trying to get a head start on Apple and its own lucrative back-to-school deals.
This isn’t the first large enterprise experimenting with such a crowdfunding initiative. Earlier this year, for example, Dodge created the ‘Dart Registry’ platform with the help of RocketHub, which had a similar mission, though with much higher funding goals.
Tags: back-to-school-deals, chip-in, crowd-funding, crowdfunding, laptops, microsoft, windows
Read More →Google Glass Should Be Banned For Privacy Reasons Say One In Five UK Residents, Per New Survey
Google Glass isn’t even a product released for public consumption yet and already people are up in arms about its effect on personal privacy. A new survey of around 4,000 UK residents conducted by Rackspace and Goldsmiths at the University of London has found that 20 percent of respondents believe Google Glass should be banned outright, while 61 percent think Glass and other wearable camera devices should at least be regulated.
The survey mirrors some early knee-jerk reactions to Google Glass, namely the banning of its use in some bars and casinos. Google itself has already forbidden facial recognition apps on the platform, to make it so that you couldn’t use the thing for stalkery or more sinister purposes, and for a whole host of other sensible reasons. Glass seems to strike many as a little too much like an all-seeing eye, and that’s not a good look when you’re already the product of a company people have privacy qualms about. Plus, in a recent interview Rackspace employee and early Glass evangelist Robert Scoble had trouble convincing BBC’s Jeremy Paxman that “thing on [his] head” could provide any possible advantage.
The idea that someone has a camera on their face that could take videos or snap photos relatively surreptitiously is understandably going to give folks pause. And the idea that it’s a way for Google to gather even more information not only about its users, but about potentially everything they see, say and hear, is bound to ruffle the feathers of those who value their personal privacy. But in truth, Glass likely doesn’t encroach too much further on the average person’s privacy than your typical smartphone, especially given the rate at which that tech is progressing.
The flipside of the survey also reflects a growing interest in wearable tech in general, however. It found that an estimated 8 million British citizens are already using wearable devices, and that 16 million plan on coming onboard with the trend as it starts to become more common. Seventy-one percent of those who wear the devices feel they have benefitted from them in some way, and 55 percent are using them for health and wellness purposes.
Perhaps most interestingly, there’s a strong contingent of people who’d be willing to share data gathered from wearables with third parties, given the right incentive. Twenty-five percent would offer up data to third parties in exchange for health insurance benefits and other incentives, while 35 percent would be willing to strap on a device that shares data with Britain’s National Health Service, which is its publicly-funded health care system. Wearables could increase the quality of care, keep patient records more accurate and up-to-date, and provide early warning of looming health problems.
The takeaway is that users are wary of wearable tech, but also willing to put aside their fears in the face of material benefit. Glass could face a lot of FUD before, during and after it launches, but people also clearly see the potential, too.
Additional reporting by Natasha Lomas
Read More →Forbes: Professors Share Research on Crowdfunding
Gordon Burtch of the University of Minnesota, Anindya Ghose of New York University and Sunil Wattal of Temple University have recently published their study …
Read More →Fracture Raises Another $500K For On-Demand Printing Of Photos On Glass
Fracture, a digital “maker” startup offering an on-demand system for printing your photos on glass, has raised an additional $500,000 on top of its previous $1.5 million in outside funding, following a year that saw the company’s revenue double.
Though photo printing on glass is not new, the company has developed a proprietary UV-based digital photo-to-glass manufacturing process, which, as we’ve detailed before, allows the photos to last for at least three years in direct sunlight, or up to a decade with careful handling before any fading.
Based in Gainesville, Fla., (also home to Grooveshark), Fracture was founded in 2009 by University of Florida graduates, Abhi Lokesh and Alex Theodore. Lokesh’s background is in biology, but his passion for technology later found him working in an undergrad lab at the university focused on building calibration technology for the Mars Phoenix Lander mission. Theodore, meanwhile (who Lokesh calls the “MacGyver of our times”), has been an avid photographer since his pre-teen years and has a degree in chemical engineering.
Both founders had a desire to modernize photo-printing, drawn to the science and the technology behind building up their own manufacturing process from scratch. Explains Lokesh, “[photo printing on] glass had always been something that was very specialized, meant just for large-scale industrial purposes, and we looked at this giant vacuum that had left as far as a consumer photo opportunity — which is that printing framing has not changed in decades.”
Fracture didn’t really begin shipping product until later in 2010, says Lokesh. But while the startup has done very little marketing during this ramp-up period while it has been stress testing its manufacturing process, it pulled in $86,000 in gross revenue during its first year shipping, and this past year, it has grown that number to $700,000. The company ships on average 30-40 orders per day worldwide, at margins around 40 to 50 percent.
Fracture raised over half a million from friends and family in 2011, then in September 2011, received a $1 million commitment (convertible debt) with $530,000 as the initial disbursement from the Florida Opportunity Fund. Last May, the state’s Tamiami Angel Fund (TAFI) committed to $750,000 in funding, which the startup received $410,000 of initially.
Now, as of April 2013, TAFI upped its second half from $340,000 to $500,000, based on Fracture’s performance. Though TAFI tipped a couple of local papers about its investment, the company itself never officially confirmed TAFI’s new funding until now.
Fracture glass prints are available as portraits, landscapes or squares (which work well for Instagram photos) in a range of sizes, and they’re available as either wall or stand mounts. Pricing ranges from as low as $12 up to $125 for large portraits, and custom sizes are also available.
The company now has a team of 11 working at its 5,300-square-foot manufacturing, packaging and sales facility in downtown Gainesville. Now that Fracture has stabilized its production process, it’s ready to start pushing demand by using the new funding mainly for marketing purposes. Further down the road, the company will work on bringing its service to mobile via an app, and then later expanding to new materials, as well as offering different displaying techniques.
Read More →Bijoy Goswami Doesn’t Want Austin To Be The Next Silicon Valley
Bijoy Goswami is a fascinating man. Born in India, the entrepreneurial evangelist lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the U.S. before attending Stanford University. Now, and for the last 15 years or so, he lives in Austin, TX, and we were fortunate to have him speak at the TC Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off.
But even though he went to Stanford, The Human Fabric author doesn’t want Austin to become the next Silicon Valley.
He explained that the DNA of Silicon Valley (and all of California, actually) comes from this notion of becoming an overnight success. It all started with the Gold Rush, in 1849, he explained.
“Silicon Valley is the product of the Gold Rush. In 1849, people came with nothing and if they struck gold they’d become a millionaire. The formation of California started with this, and the whole of the state began to believe in the idea of overnight success,” said Bijoy on stage with John Biggs. “It’s part of their DNA, and they use technology because that’s the biggest lever to achieve that end.”
Goswami believes that Austin entrepreneurialism is quite different, and comes from a place of authenticity and passion.
“In Austin we want to be ourselves, and we’re all on a journey to be ourselves,” said Goswami. “The startup culture here is derived from a personal journey, and from where they’re passion comes from. They don’t care if they’ll be big or small, but they care about being authentic and giving their passion to the world.”
Goswami went on to say that Austinites don’t build the tools, but use them. Whereas new technology comes straight out of Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs in Austin use that technology to leverage their own passion projects and ideas. This explains why our the winners of our pitch-off, a post-production video editing collaboration tool called First Cut Pro, an Expedia for doggy day care called Embarkly, and an children’s camps and activities marketplace called Camperoo, were all focused on niche markets and solutions.
Read More →Wise.io Debuts Machine Learning Service That Offers To The Public What Google Builds For Itself
Google, LinkedIn and Amazon have thousands of engineers who point their work inward to build better recommendations, search and other Internet-scale features. Wise.io is launching today to offer a similar form of machine learning that does the inverse by pointing its technology outward for people to use.
It’s not to say that Wise.io will necessarily compete against these companies. It’s just to point out the company’s machine learning as a service is something that can be used by anyone to solve problems that now takes hundreds or thousands of people to do.
It’s the kind of company a scientist studying the great beyond would start. Someone like Joshua Bloom, the founder of Wise.io and a former professor of astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley who launched his company today at the Alchemist Accelerator Demo Day. The company will now join the Citrix Startup Accelerator program and receive seed funding as well an undisclosed investment from the Alchemist group.
Wise.io works with machine-learning algorithms to make them fast and scalable. To do that, Bloom and his team used their years of studying quasars, black holes and the depths of space and built that knowledge into its technology. He said in his research at Berkeley, often he and others would manage data that was well beyond conventional tools could offer. They had to invent the technology themselves. Now all that knowledge is getting packaged to offer as a service. It is still pretty complex. The site says Wise.io is built for data scientists and ready for the enterprise. The service features a data scientist marketplace, automated reports
Wise.io acts as a framework for ingesting data from Hadoop, MongoDB and various file sources. The engine creates multi-dimensional views of the data it ingests. For example, machine learning can analyze every pixel in a picture and correlate its relationship to all the other pixels in the photo. The Wise.io engne can as well as the billions of other signals that it relates to. Scale that multi-dimensional view from billions of signals and the benefits can come in any kind of form. A streaming provider might know if the customer using the smartphone is sitting or standing. The Wise.io framework serves as a central brain that takes a holistic look at the data. It has its most useful applications in tasks that require a high level of cognition and intelligence to get the work done.
He said the problem today stems from the many years it takes to do the computations that machine learning can offer. Netflix considered a machine learning option a few years ago but it would take 100 years to implement, he said. Wise.io works with machine-learning algorithms to make them fast and scalable. To do that, Bloom and his team used their years of studying quasars, black holes and the depths of space and built that knowledge into its technology. He said in his research at Berkeley, often he and others on his team would manage data that was well beyond what conventional tools could offer. They had to invent the technology themselves. Now all that knowledge is getting packaged to offer as a service.
The company is targeting markets such an industrial safety, which has historically required analyzing data at scale. It can often take six months to produce a report for a customer about all tits safety hazards. “It takes hundreds of man hours,” he said. “We can do it in 20 minutes.”’
That kind of time savings means fewer people are required to do the job, which makes Wise.io both fascinating and reflective on who we are and the age that is rapidly emerging before us. As Bloom said to me, the industrial age saw machines doing the physical lifting. Today data does the intellectual lifting. And that’s something to chew on.
Wise.io might very well compete with Google, which is now scaling its Google Cloud platform after making it generally available at Google I/O earlier this month. But the real competitor is the market noise. Data analytics providers, in-memory database companies and the list of competitors goes on and on. But money does talk. Bloom said he expects Wise.io to have $1.3 million in revenues by the end of the year.
Read More →